Announcing Summer Harvest at Prouty Woods Community Forest

New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) will be conducting a sustainable, climate-smart timber harvest beginning this week at our Prouty Woods Community Forest, located behind NEFF headquarters in Littleton, MA. A licensed forester who has worked with NEFF for years has selected individual trees for harvesting, and is in the process of getting necessary equipment on the ground. NEFF will post updates about the harvest timeline to this blog post.

We anticipate the harvest to take roughly two months, during which the property and trails will be closed to the public. This is a precautionary measure to keep NEFF’s visitors safe. We are also taking steps to minimize soil disruption and trail impacts.

NEFF staff members have already reached out to Littleton town officials, community members near Prouty and relevant organizations to provide advance notice of the harvest. If you have questions, please email info@newenglandforestry.org.

NEFF’s Approach to the Harvest

NEFF’s top priority throughout the harvest will be Prouty Woods’ wellbeing. The harvest will be conducted in keeping with NEFF’s own Exemplary Forestry management approach, which prioritizes forests’ long-term health and outlines high standards of sustainability for three key goals: mitigating climate change, improving wildlife habitat and biodiversity, and growing and harvesting more sustainable wood.

NEFF has also identified goals specific to the summer 2024 Prouty harvest that our foresters will work to accomplish. In addition to demonstrating Exemplary Forestry in action, the Prouty goals are:

• Remove about 20 percent of Prouty’s sawtimber-sized trees, meaning trees that are 12+ inches in diameter at chest height and big enough to produce lumber, as well as some poorly formed and low-quality trees of various sizes
• Give the remaining high-quality trees more room to grow
• Encourage growth of younger trees
• Provide habitat for native wildlife, which benefits from forests with trees and tree stands of a wide range of ages
• Increase tree stocking—or the amount of wood growing on a given area of land—and the amount of carbon pulled from the atmosphere and stored in Prouty Woods over the next 30 years
• Protect recreational opportunities and waterways
• Minimize soil disruption
• Sell the lumber-quality harvested wood for use in long-lived products, which lock away carbon in wood for decades. The poorly formed and low-quality trees will be sold for firewood and pulp/paper products

Prouty was last harvested in 2007, and that harvest has been unnoticeable to trail users for years. NEFF expects the 2024 harvest to produce the same results. This speaks to forests’ resiliency and to NEFF’s well-crafted harvest plans.

Great Crested Flycatcher in an area of NEFF’s Prouty Woods that won’t be harvested, Twolined Studio

The Big Picture

Harvests, like those that typically happen every 15–20 years on NEFF forestlands, produce the wood-based materials we all use. From paper-derived products like cardboard packaging, to high-quality wood furniture and building materials for homes and offices, we all rely on and benefit from wood in its various forms. In order to fight climate change, it is important we move from highly polluting products like plastic, concrete and steel to bio-based, highly recyclable products like wood whenever possible. We encourage website visitors who have questions about climate-smart harvests’ ability to impact global carbon to read through the signs we’ll be posting at Prouty, as well as the following webpages: Exemplary Forestry | 30 Percent Solution | Bioeconomy Initiative | Build It With Wood.

The Prouty harvest has come along at an exciting and highly relevant time for NEFF; NEFF and partners have received $30 million from the USDA’s Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities program to help forest landowners implement climate-smart forestry on 66,000 acres across New England, and to build markets for climate-smart forest products like mass timber. And right as the landowner-specific programs in NEFF’s Climate-Smart Commodities project get up and running, here we are at Prouty Woods with an opportunity to demonstrate Exemplary Forestry in action.

Prouty Over Time

While sections of Prouty will look different after the harvest, this is a recurring transition we go through every 15 or 20 years. In the days, months, and years that follow, we hope visitors take the opportunity to carefully observe the regeneration of the forest and the accelerated growth of the remaining trees: Closely note the changes in the ecological landscape, watch for the formation of new habitats, look for visiting wildlife, and more. In short, we invite you to learn how Exemplary managed forests are healthy, thriving forests.